> Rural communities are banding together to chop firewood so that people in need can heat their homes. This shouldn’t be necessary.
Headlines like this are so commonplace these days I instinctively avoid them. They're telling you what your opinion should be, not educating you so you can make an informed decision.
The entire piece keeps telling you to ignore the people in question, their statements and their preferences. It wants to push this doomer narrative of left behind people, while ignoring that communities are putting these banks together & the government is actively supporting them.
I think mischaracterizing this as a sign of collapse (a word that I'd only use for the result being a permanent state of affairs), it does point towards a sort of extreme economic distress that's difficult to overstate.
Title wasn't editorialized in keeping with forum guidelines, but I found the topic interesting (TIL wood banks), so I leave it to mods to update the title to something they find more appropriate (if necessary). "There are wood banks? Interesting! How do they work? Why do we need them?" and so on.
Totally, and that's fair; I hope the discussion can be more about the topic and not the quality of the article itself. Lots of other links in this thread on the topic (rural wood banks) that are relevant, and I think it's an interesting story about community, rural self reliance, governance system failures, etc. "Think in systems."
It's easy to say "this article is trash and move on." Lets do the hard way and talk about the topic instead of the piece specifically. Please try to be curious.
Headlines like this are so commonplace these days I instinctively avoid them. They're telling you what your opinion should be, not educating you so you can make an informed decision.